Here’s an interesting speed fact. Two of the top three fastest human beings in track and field history were first spotted playing cricket. It was Usain Bolt’s run-up as a schoolboy fast bowler – imagine, for a moment, the sheer, oozing splendour of the Bolt run-up – that gave a first hint of the talent beneath those ankle-flapping flannels. Yohan Blake, another gold medallist this summer, was first spotted running in to bowl by his headmaster at Bogue Hill school, the brilliantly named O’Neil Ankle.
Watching the Olympic sprints in Rio it was tempting to conjure up some dreamy parallel world in which the front half of Jamaica’s brutal, brilliant 4x100 relay team shunned the lure of the green romper suit and instead ended up opening the bowling for West Indies. Cricket and speed: it has always been an intoxicating mix, just as speed remains an obsession in all sport, the measure of a very basic kind of human ultimacy.
Not that cricket has lacked for speed in recent times. The world’s fastest bowler, Mitchell Starc, has been quietly traumatising the Sri Lankan top order even as Australia have stuttered. Dale Steyn, still quick when he cranks it up, still resembling a very angry cartoon shark unconvincingly disguised in human form as he barrels in, has put New Zealand to flight. Best of all for those who follow England, Mark Wood has emerged after his ankle injuries not just fit, fun and perky, but startlingly fast.
Wood was rested at Headingley on Thursday. England won again, keeping Pakistan to their lowest total of the series. On the face of it they scarcely missed a bowler who hasn’t taken a five-for in any cricket for two and a half years, has so far conceded a spendthrift 178 in 30 overs in the series, and who is yet to make any real dent in international cricket.
And yet Wood was missed. The buzz around this fun, bold England team has been all about the batting, that endless gorge of swats and swipes and dinks and flaps. But Wood has been equally captivating. Drooling over the speed gun is of course callow and facile, anathema to serious analysis. And yet I think we should still drool over the speed gun for a while. Since his return Wood has regularly nudged up into the mid-90s. At Trent Bridge one delivery – driven for four by Azhar Ali – zipped in at 95mph.
Ninety-five! In terms of concerted speed this is as fast as any England bowler since people started keeping score. Some say Steve Harmison clocked 96mph back in 2004. The internet suggests Craig White – who prefaced his toe-crushing right-arm screamers by idling to the wicket like a painfully diffident manservant preparing to knock on the parlour doors and announce with a cough that the bailiffs are at the gate – once touched 97.
But the measurements are more settled now. On the numbers Wood, who saw himself as a batsman until quite late in his age-group cricket, can now stand as the quickest English bowler of his generation.
It is a statement that will cause some to splutter and wibble their jowls. But then speed is an oddly personal fascination, jealously cherished, grudgingly ladled out. Cricket-lovers cling to their memories of speed in the way some people cling to moments of their youth: music, clothes, a hairstyle.
Ernest Jones, who bowled a ball through WG Grace’s beard, was the “fastest of the fastest”, and shall remain so in perpetuity. Harold Larwood, the fastest English bowler who ever lived, was closely followed by Frank Tyson, also the fastest English bowler who ever lived. Bob Willis’s famous zombie-paceman spell at Headingley, when he simply ran in, eyes rolling, and sank his dripping teeth into a succession of doomed Australians, remains a sacred interlude to those who saw it.
This is another part of proper pace bowling. It is one of the few parts of cricket you really do need to see live: ideally to face it, to field to it, to feel the weird, gripping energy of any cricketer at any level extending themselves to their full reach. There is a butterflyish quality to these whippy, chancy types, all brittle grace and straining sinews, cricketers who can wrench a moment their way through sheer, intoxicating speed.
Against this the presence of the gun has undoubtedly brought a narrowing of focus, a dwindling away into the bare numbers that gives only half the picture. They say Joel Garner bowled no more than low 80s, but the memory lingers of relentless, low pulse-rate menace. Glenn McGrath wasn’t quick, but he still broke Kevin Pietersen’s rib in his final summer and nobody got more nip and jag. The greatest single act of modern fast bowling, Shoaib Akhtar’s successive stump-splaying yorkers to Rahul Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar in a riotous Test in Calcutta, was as much about craft and skill as pure hostility.
Akhtar is one of five bowlers recorded edging past the 100mph mark. He remains top of the tree on the magic 161.3kmh, just ahead of the Brett Lee-Shaun Tait-Thommo-Starc peleton. It is an absurdly precise top speed, but one the speed nerds can still point to as a kind of absolute. The air up there is pretty cramped. Barring some mechanical breakthrough, there seems to be a limit to how far human beings can push this, although Starc will still fancy his chances of beating that mark come the next Ashes series.
Beyond this much has changed over time when it comes to speed and the effects of speed, from back foot no-balls, to protective gear, to basic method. The dawdling, rhythmic approaches, the swooping full-body delivery stride have largely gone. The modern fast bowler is a compact, high intensity athlete. Lee seems to be the model, with his sprinter’s approach, braced front knee, astonishing full-body follow-through. Plus, most remarkable, his extreme high-speed longevity.This is above all a fragile business. Fast bowling tends to eat its young, a wild, unnatural activity that chafes and wrenches at every joint. This is the fear with Wood, England’s own king of the gun, whose speed is generated from a short, bouncy approach and the fearlessness with which he hurls himself into the crease, but who has also suffered terribly with injury.
In six years of first-class cricket Wood has bowled 892 overs, not far off Fred Trueman’s average for each of his 20 professional seasons. Even now, nursing that reconditioned hoof, Wood is bowling on the edge, pressing hard for another central contract this September just to keep himself at cash-strapped Durham. Sunday’s final ODI in Cardiff and the T20 game that follows will be crucial; a question, as ever in the search for speed, of never easing off, of keeping the pedal down, the throttle high, every tendon strained from the first gun to the finish line.
